“Here,” he told himself as he stood upon a certain raised portion of earth, “those slaves could not have slept. The space is too narrow and irregular. There were many hundreds of workmen. The greater part of them were slaves condemned to toil on the wall. They must be kept together, guarded against escape at night. Must have been a broad, clear, open space.”
After wandering about, flashing his light far and near, walking here, turning to the right, then to the left he came to a definite conclusion.
“This broad square,” he told himself, “must have been the sleeping ground of the workers. And from this point only a small section of the wall may be seen, not more than a fourth of it.”
Of a sudden, he started. It came to him with something of a shock that this very section of the wall might be seen plainly from their own camp. Dorn and Pompee had told him of the giant with fiery eyes who walked the wall at night, and the little man, the bearer of the telescope, who followed after, but he had quite frankly disbelieved their story. It was, he had said, but the work of their overwrought imagination. Now, as some slight confirmation of its plausibility came to him, he experienced an overpowering desire to go once more to the crest of the Citadel.
“This time,” he told himself, “I will avoid pitfalls.” For all that he found himself unable to suppress a shudder as his foot touched the first step of the stairway.
* * * * * * * *
During all this time Curlie was experiencing unsurmountable difficulties in his work as an inventive genius. The drums he had procured at some hazard did not fulfill his purpose. One, it was true, worked admirably. The other did not work at all.
“Of course,” he grumbled to himself, “one could use whistles, but drums would be more effective and dramatic.” The thought that in this land he might use the drums, which had played so great a part in the history of the country, to serve a new and strange end thrilled him to the very center of his being.
“Anyone knows that drums are of different tones, the same as bells and whistles,” he told himself. “And I’ll find the ones I want though they cost me thirty gourdes apiece.” The gourdes he spoke of were not the kind that grow on vines but Haitian silver coins worth twenty cents in American money.
Curious enough, just as he came to this conclusion there sounded on the still night air a faint, long drawn tum—tum—tum.